Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Alan Cottrill inspects the golden statue of President Trump that he designed in Zanesville, Ohio. Credit... Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Ukraine's air force said Russia launched 71 missiles and 450 drones into the country overnight, of which 38 missiles and 412 drones were shot down or suppressed. Twenty-seven missiles and 31 drones impacted across 27 locations, the air force said . Moscow's latest overnight barrage came amid temperatures as low as -14 By David Brennan, ABC News , February 3, 2026, 6:46 AM; see also and also LONDON -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged "maximum pressure" on Russia from the international community after Moscow fired hundreds of drones and missiles into Ukraine overnight into Tuesday morning, in a major attack that Zelenskyy said focused on the country's  critical energy infrastructure . The strike was the largest reported by the Ukrainian air force of the year so far, and the largest overall number of munitions launched in a single night since the night of Dec. 27.   The number of missiles fired on Monday night was also unusually high, and the largest to...

Citation from a volume by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at N.Y.U. and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” a book which also covers Putin and Trump. From the volume:   Putin’s overreach in Ukraine. When Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he “already had it all, down to the gold toilet seats in his absurd palace in Crimea,” as Margaret MacMillan  put it . He had eliminated rivals, had jailed dissenters and was a main energy supplier to much of Europe. He paid no significant price for his imperialist aggressions in Georgia in 2008 or Crimea in 2014, with the Crimean annexation giving him a  nationalist high  and boosting his popularity. But Mr. Putin had become insecure. He was fearful of internal dissent, as evidenced by his escalating repression of Alexei Navalny, and fearful of Ukraine’s  democracy  over the border . While older Russians supported him, a  Levada  poll in February 2021 indicated that nearly hal...